<Begin Segment 12>

BN: So you come back here, your husband's working with the YMCA. And then at what point do you start your work here? When you're coming back, right? You had a fairly young child, or two, or one.

JK: And so my mom was all set to babysit. I started at Maemae because... I think it was the year after. I think we came back... it wasn't quite a year later, yeah. And so I joined the DOE. So I was at Maemae just for that year, because they had lost a teacher over the summer, and so I was a late replacement. And then after that, I was moved to Mokapu Elementary. And then from Mokapu, I moved to Enchanted Lake Elementary. And then from there I went up to the state level.

BN: And then at some point you kind of switched to being a librarian?

JK: Yes. I switched to being a librarian when I was at Mokapu. And I was a teacher there, but I got to be friends with the school librarian there, and she loved her job. And pretty soon I thought, oh boy, that really sounds like something I would love to do. And then she told me, "I'm moving on. They're opening a brand new high school, I'm going there." And so I asked the principal, "What are you going to do now? You need a librarian." I said, "I'd be interested." He says, "Good. Go to summer school and take six credits, and I'll hire you for the librarian." And I guess I'd been all right because he said if that hadn't opened, he was going to offer me some kind of language arts specialist or something just to hang on to me. And I thought, oh, okay. And I found I loved librarianship, that's where I belonged.

BN: What in particular did you enjoy about it?

JK: You know, I think it was a bunch of things. One is that one to one with the kids. They come and they go, and then you want to help them read, and that part I really liked. What else did I like about it? I liked reading all the new books before the kids got them. And then eventually I found out that I really liked planning and organizing. And you have to do some of that, even at the school level. But by the time I got to the state level, you're doing a lot of that, and I really liked that part. So I'm thankful to my father, because he said, "No nurse, you got to be a teacher." But if I hadn't been a teacher, I couldn't have gotten into the librarianship.

BN: I'm just trying to get a sense of, like, about how many years were you a teacher versus a librarian? Was it more or less equal or did you switch fairly early on?

JK: Fairly early on.

BN: So you were a librarian for longer than you were a teacher.

JK: Yeah, uh-huh. I think I was a teacher for maybe, oh, less than five years.

BN: Okay, but mostly...

JK: Mostly library.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.